Former Deadspinner and biannual blogger Kyle Wagner told me yesterday that he got a three-piece from Popeyes and there was no thigh in the box. Can you imagine that? I’d fucking die if my Popeyes order didn’t have a thigh in it. That knob of skin fat that’s just hanging off? That’s the best part of my year. I want to be buried in Popeyes chicken thighs. Don’t ever let them stick you with three dry breasts or any other kind of disrespectful combo. Wagner got played like a goddamn sucker.

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Your letters:

Carson:

What is the worst color for a car? And how in the hell do people end up with a light green Nissan Cube (or insert bad car/color combo) anyway? Whenever I see a car with some ridiculous color I try and put myself in their shoes but I just can’t figure it out.

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For this exercise, I’m gonna stick to basic colors and not delve into the sordid and confusing world of official car colors, like Ocean Pearl, Red Chili, Forest Moon, Tangerine Bath, Tongue, Amethyst Fart, Vanilla Girthstone, Granite Night Terror, and Blue Methane. You can get lost for days in that tangle of glossy and sparkly finishes. Here’s how I’d rank the worst of them:

Bright green. What are you, the Green Goblin? I’m all for a hunter green sports coupe with a tan leather interior. That’s pure SEX, my friends. But once you dial that green up to sour apple, that shit looks like a clown car.

Purple. I’m a Vikings fan and even I would kick a purple car right out of the driveway. The best reason to pick a bright color for your car is if A) You bought your fourth impossibly fancy Italian sports car and already have it in red, yellow, and black, or B) You’re buying a Geo Metro or some other cheap piece of shit, so you may as well spring for the purple one and then refer to it as “The Hot Rod” for laughs.

Tan/Beige. My folks owned a beige Volvo, which is the most ‘80s car possible. Tan cars have not aged well. A tan car may as well be unpainted. “Why yes, I would like the Dead Sea Camouflage for my van.”

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I should disclose here that I own two cars: one bright red, and one bright white. I did not expect to own a white car, but that’s what the dealer had, and hanging out at a car dealer makes me wanna die, so I bought the white minivan and got the fuck out of there. That’s how people end up driving cars that are purple and green and other weird colors. They don’t WANT a purple car, but it’s there on the lot and the price is right, and so they compromise and drive home in a fucking eggplant. I’m still amazed that car manufacturers can sustain a business by pre-fabricating green cars and hoping someone is desperate enough to buy one.

Jeremy:

Do you think we will ever see another player/coach in our lifetime? If so, what sport will that most likely be?

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We won’t see another player-coach in our lifetimes because no team wants to deal with the publicity involved, even when it’s the right thing to do. Even if a team has a de facto player-coach (Peyton, LeBron, Kobe, etc), they’ll still deploy a figurehead whose job is to sit at the presser, and book flights, and scout college players, and do all the other petty bullshit that no sane player wants to do.

This is a shame because we SHOULD have more player-coaches. Not only do I enjoy the novelty of some asshole like Pete Rose pulling double duty, but it would help get rid of the whole “coaches coach, players play” mentality that’s still permeating the sports landscape. Coaches are all insane assholes who devote inhumane amounts of time to tape study and game planning, and they often get lionized for it. That part of profession—with all its competitive insomnia—is basically treated as a necessary evil. This is especially true when it comes to football, which has become overly complicated by coaches to the point of absurdity.

But what if that’s not as necessary as it’s made out to be? I would love to see a player come along and take over formal coaching duties and blow up the model. This would easy to pull off in basketball, where the head coach is usually a former player who delegates strategy to a bunch of lackeys anyway. And I’d love to see a college basketball team elect to be self-coached, with players sorting out and implementing strategies on the fly and learning to play together on their own, instead of having some fuckball in a suit yell at them for 40 minutes. Surely some dipshit school like Northwestern could adopt that policy and sell it as HACKING the basketball paradigm.

Specialization is already a scourge across youth sports, with kids committing to a single sport—often a single position—and abandoning all other activities. And not only does that wear players out, but it also discounts the idea that you can apply shit you learn from one field and use it in another. That’s incredibly valuable, so I’d rather see a sporting world where players are more versatile both in terms of their positions and their responsibilities. I want players coaching and coaches playing, and hitters pitching, and linebackers quarterbacking. LET’S GET FUCKING WILD HERE.

Grant:

So here’s a hypothetical for you. You get to fill an Olympic sized pool with anything you want, and you’ll get to keep all of it. However, in order for you to keep the stuff, you have to survive a jump into it from the 10m platform. What do you choose? I’d think would survive jumping into a bunch of loose cash. Maybe nacho cheese? Liquid gold?

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You would NOT survive a 10m fall into a pile of loose cash. That would kill you instantly. You would have to pick a liquid (definitely NOT a boiling precious metal of some sort) or some kind of spongy packing material. My first thought was oil, but oil is so viscous that I may die even attempting THAT. This site has an extensive list of the most valuable liquids in the world, including human blood, horseshoe crab blood (whuh?), LSD, scorpion blood, and Chanel No. 5. That LSD is tempting, but I assume swimming in acid is probably not very good for your brain.

Me? I’m diving into a pool of Pappy Van Winkle. Not only would it bring me great joy, but I bet that I could easily rebottle all of the bourbon and sell it off to hipsters and other assorted typewriter owners for a small discount. There’s no way I could re-sell human blood after I’ve contaminated it with my taint butter.

Justin:

What was the object that friends you grew up with (pre-1990) had that made you think they were rich, and in hindsight is hilarious? Padded toilet seats were mine.

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Oh, any table game. Like if a kid had a ping pong table, I thought his family was LOADED. And if he had an air hockey table, well then his daddy must have been a billionaire. Even now, I attach table games to affluence. I bought a foosball table on clearance when the local Sports Authority went out of business around here, and I felt like a GOD. I put that thing together in my basement and I was like, “This is it. I HAVE MADE IT.” In my still-adolescent brain, you are a true baller if you have a used Porsche, a jet ski, and a pinball machine somewhere on your property. That is my holy trinity.

And don’t forget about car phones. I knew one kid whose mom had a car phone back in the day. There was a base stuck to the middle console of their Ford Windstar, with a coil wire extending from the base to the receiver. It blew my mind when his mom used it. The phone may as well have been made out of solid emeralds. Honorable mention goes to waterbeds.

One more thing: You know those small motorized cars that you could win if you finished the Double Dare obstacle course? I thought those things cost a million dollars. Any kid putt-putting around in a tiny model Jeep was Richie Rich, as far as I was concerned.

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Scott:

I was watching Slap Shot earlier and it got me thinking, who is the greatest pair/set of siblings in film?

I don’t know if I can top the Hanson Brothers for this, because they were great and because they were essentially a single character in the form of three people. I don’t even remember their first names, even though I’ve seen Slap Shot 90 times. They’re just the Hanson Brothers. Like, I could pick the Corleone kids, but do you really think of The Godfather as a movie about just siblings and not a greater family?

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I’m gonna dredge up a few more movie siblings here, but not I’m not gonna rank them because I’m sure I fucked up and missed a bunch of glaring examples.

Star Wars (Luke and Leia). They’ll always be the most famous sibling characters in movie history even if it still feels like George Lucas decided that they were brother and sister WAY after he started making the original trilogy. We need another spinoff movie where some shadowy character had a plan for those two to kiss, to help sew the plot holes together.

The Blues Brothers. I’m still amazed that movie was 148 minutes long. Whenever they played it on WGN when I was a kid, they stretched it out over four hours. They may as well have been screening Ben-Hur, it took so long. Anyway, use of excessive force in the apprehension of the Blues Brothers has been approved.

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Frozen. True story: I have not watched Frozen all the way through. I am certain I’ve seen every minute of it, just not in the proper order. Anyway, whenever my youngest kid wants to watch it and they get to the end of the “Do You Wanna Build A Snowman” song, I’m a wreck. I can’t go on. Even thinking about it right now ruins me. THOSE POOR GIRLS.

Flowers in the Attic. This was the movie based on the book where the siblings bone. I don’t think they did it in the movie though.

Hell or High Water. OH FUCK YEAH REDNECK BROS GOIN’ OUT AND SHOOTIN’ UP SOME BANKS. In every movie about brothers, there is always one CRAZY brother who is his own worst enemy, while the other one is always straight-laced and trying to help the other brother stop being such a fuckup. And you know what? The good brother NEVER succeeds. Ever. Once a crazy brother, always a crazy brother.

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Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Ferris and Jeanie). Jeanie was the fucking best. They’re gonna reboot this movie one day and it’ll be awful unless it’s a Jeanie origin story where she insults everyone around her like a little asshole.

Rain Man. They made us sing “Iko Iko” in 7th grade choir and I will never forgive this movie for it.

Harry Potter films (The Weasley twins). There are a million “Which Potter character are you?” generators on the Internet, and I would like to be one of the Weasley twins way bad. But I already know any such quiz would end with me being, like, Goyle. That would suck.

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HALFTIME!

Jonathan:

Having just lopped off a good chunk of thumb while cutting an onion, I started wondering what food item causes the most knife injuries? Definitely onions for me because: a. Fuckers are slippery and b. I use them in everything. Sweet potatoes are a close second.

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Yeah man, I have an easier time butchering a whole antelope than cutting up a sweet potato*. Sometimes the knife gets stuck halfway through and then only King Arthur can pull it out. It’s the worst.

Anyway, last month I noted that bread knives are unspeakably dangerous, so I think that bread needs to be way up on your list, especially bagels. Sometimes I live dangerously and cut a bagel either by placing my hand on top of the flat bagel and slicing across it or, even worse, slicing across it while it’s still IN MY HAND. Like I watch the knife come a millimeter away from my palm and then I tear the rest. Do not do this. This is unspeakably stupid. Slice your bagel vertically, or get one of those guillotine bagel cutters that looks like it works but actually just mashes the whole thing down into the base.

Onions are also high on the list because, as Jonathan said, they’re in everything. And it’s not like garlic, which is also in everything but relatively small and easy to smash with the broad side of your knife. Onions are both slippery and round, which makes them the ideal choice for turning your kitchen into a Final Destination installment.

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*My parents both hate sweet potatoes but I never realized it until one Thanksgiving when I made them as a side and they didn’t touch it. I was, like, 37. And my folks eat everything, but somehow I had made the ONE thing they both utterly abhorred. I can’t even imagine what kind of terrifying old sweet potato recipes they were subjected to in their respective youths.

Gunther:

Which QBs would you consider Kaepernick over right now?

I think both Houston and the Jets would be better off with Kaepernick on the roster instead of the stiffs they currently have lingering around. I don’t know what Kap’s asking price is (ditto Jay Cutler, who sucks but is still a much better player than Josh fucking McCown), and I know that there are legit football reasons for staying away from Kap right now. His confidence has been shot ever since Harbaugh left. But this is dumb. There aren’t 96 quarterbacks out there better than a dude who completed nearly 60 percent of his passes for a flaming shitwreck of a team. Given that quarterbacks get hurt all the time, it’s near malpractice to not sign one of the big names out in the ether as a backup. Even Chip Kelly vouched for Kaepernick, and Chip Kelly would rather use CGI players than real ones.

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Take my team, for example. My team just signed whatever is left of Case Keenum’s brain matter for depth. Case Keenum blows. I’d feel much more secure with Kaepernick backing up Brad Samford, but my team won’t do it because it might upset the two guys on the offensive line to like to go hunt quail. You never heard the Bills bitching about Richie Incognito being a distraction, and he’s a much worse person. But since he fits into the football culture, his past actions are considered, against all odds, less divisive. Someone give Kap and Smokin’ Jay jobs already.

Ryan:

Rank Queens of the Stone Age’s albums please.

Songs for the Deaf

Rated R

Self-Titled

Lullabies To Paralyze

…Like Clockwork

Era Vulgaris

I like all those albums, by the way. There really is no “worst” QOTSA album. They range only from Most Greatest to Least Greatest. I hold them all in high esteem. And the best part of having a favorite band is oscillating between favorite songs and albums. One week I’m really into the first album. The next week, I’m going back to the new album and being like, “Whoa goddamn! This is still really good, too!” Josh Homme could release a full album of harpsichord solos and I’d be smitten. He’ll probably do that next week with a side project.

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Adam:

Is Rice-A-Roni good? I remember having it as a kid and fucking loving it.

Yeah, it’s still good. It’s rice pilaf, which is always tasty, especially when you stir in a seasoning packet containing 9,000,000 mg of sodium.

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However, you can also make very good rice pilaf on your own, and it’s not that hard. Are you ready for the recipe? LET’S MAKE SOME MOTHERFUCKING PILAF.

Heat up a pot and then add the butter. Once the butter is melted, add the egg noodles and stir them around until they’re lightly browned, about two minutes. Add the rice and stir that into the butter for another minute or so. Then add the broth and bring the whole thing to a boil. Once it boils, turn it down to low, cover, and simmer for 15-20 minutes. VOILA! You got a big pot of rice pilaf to last you a couple days. And it goes with virtually anything else you serve. I like to smother it in creamy hummus like a weirdo.

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Alistair:

With the NFL draft coming up relatively soon, I was wondering if this scenario makes any sense. Before the start of the general draft, what if all 32 teams were given a bonus pick which they could use in a QB-only “Round 0"? The picks would be done in the normal draft order, and they couldn’t be traded - make a selection or lose the pick.

You’re basically talking about a supplemental draft for quarterbacks. I asked the rest of the staff if this was a good idea. Here now are their replies:

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“That makes no sense”

“What’s the point of it?”

“I don’t understand this at all”

I think Alistair’s idea reflects the disproportionate influence that QBs have, and this Round 0 essentially helps mitigates the risk that comes with drafting them. It would relieve teams of the urge to trade up early for QBs and then ruin them by rushing them onto the field too soon. QB development is still a serious problem in the NFL, so something has to change. But this isn’t it. Teams would end up drafting the top QBs and then trading them away once the real draft starts, essentially circumventing the spirit of it. Also, the whole point of the draft is seeing how the Browns will fuck it all up.

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Aaron:

My place of employment uses these pre-separated toilet paper squares. The come out, basically as tissues and consist of approximately two squares of TP. You ever seen this shit before? Thoughts on it? When I first started, I hated them. I think they grew on me though after taking time to figure out how much was necessary.

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Oh wow, pre-separated! They must have done some enormous study that showed they could save $5 per fiscal year by using those. As someone who uses way too much toilet paper, I support any and all ideas to streamline and HACK the current TP model. Also, sometimes I’ve run out of toilet paper, only to be saved by a box of Kleenex that’s also within reach, either on the toilet tank on the bathroom counter. I cannot begin to describe the relief I feel when I spot that box. It’s like getting out of a speeding ticket. So even though that is some cheap, thin-ass paper, I would give it a whirl. I’ve wrestled with enough public toilet rolls in my time to want something different.

The other day a buddy and I were grabbing some subs. The shop cuts subs in half, so we each had two 6" subs, both featuring the rounded, end of the loaf and the cut portion. My buddy starts eating the sub from the rounded, end of the loaf and it really, really bothered me! Isn’t it commonplace to start with the cut end and finish with the rounded part? I’m guessing 99% of people eat this way.

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Yeah, he’s doing it all wrong. The center of the sandwich has the greatest concentration of meats and toppings, which makes it GLORIOUS. I motorboat that first bite like I’m on a honeymoon with it. Also, starting with the cut portion helps mitigate spillage. By the time I get to the heel, I’ve already sucked down the bulk of the sandwich interior and am left with a couple bites of bread and shreds of lettuce. That’s exactly how it should be. If you eat it the other way, everything will fall out. Take your man to sandwich rehab and get him on the right path.

James:

I have two buddies. One named JP, one is PJ. All other variables aside, JP is a million times cooler name than PJ, right?

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Hey, I had friend named PJ! YOU TAKE THAT BACK. You know what’s weird is how many initial names end in J: AJ, BJ, CJ, DJ, EJ, KJ, LJ, MJ, PJ, RJ, TJ, Vijay. J has a virtual monopoly over those names. What’s its secret? I’m gonna go ask my friend UJ to explain this phenomenon.

(UPDATE: Barry says the J is used a lot because it stands for “Junior,” which I did not consider because I am not terribly bright.)

I predict this will be the next trend in Terrible Utah Baby Names. You will start seeing initial nicknames like DX, and ZQ (pronounce Zeke), and KKK. It’s a mortal lock. Steel yourself.

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Steve:

I bought my wife flowers yesterday when we met up for lunch. As I was walking to the restaurant I was trying to figure out how to carry myself while holding a bouquet of flowers. Head held high, chest out with a big smile on my face... like I’m supremely confident? Or sheepish grin and shuffling my feet in a humble, “Aw shucks, I hope this works,” kinda way?

I like to keep it behind my back and walk up all casual, then spring it just as I arrive. SURPRISE! AM I NOT THE MOST THOUGHTFUL MAN IN THE WORLD? SEX PLEEEEEEEZ.

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By the way, never bring flowers to a restaurant. There’s nowhere to put them. You walk in with some prickly bouquet dripping water all over your shoes, and then what’s your old lady supposed to do with it? Put it in her purse? Bring them home instead. That way, you can hand them off to your spouse and stick her with the busywork of trimming them and putting them in a vase. Now THAT is romance.

Email of the week!

Joe:

I build wastewater treatment plants for a living (turd plants). I was on one job where we were pumping down the old aeration basins, these are the gigantic, bubbling shit jacuzzi’s you see sometimes. Somebody needed to come by on the weekend and fill the pumps up with gas, I was volunteered. Having nothing else to do on a Saturday I decided to bring my newly adopted black lab/great dane mix with me. I envisioned a great bonding experience of throwing the ball for him, while I worked, and ‘Taking Care of Business’ somehow played through the air. I let the happy fucker out and he immediately started running all over the woods next to the plant, seemingly happy as hell in dog world. I started filling the pumps and checking things over. The tank wall sticks about 3 feet above the ground, but it was roughly 15 feet down to the bubbling shit brew below. This jolly asshole comes running out of the woods and, hearing the sound of water I assume, promptly jumps up onto the wall of the tank. Not realizing it is only about 6 inches wide. He then front flips forward, falling 15 feet into the turd soup. I rush over, look down into the tank to see the dog swimming through the brown bathwater with a total look of shock, concern, and dispair. This tank has no, ladders, smooth walls, and I’m there by myself. I look down at him paddling in circles, logs floating all around, and think “This is how you die dog. Goodbye dear friend.” I end up having to hop in one of the backhoes and drop the arm down into the poo, I climb down the arm, and drag the dog into the bucket, climb back up and pull this shit covered asshole up. I had to give that dog about 14 baths. He’s never been the same since. Neither have I.